SOUTH STRAFFORD — For four days, Bruce MacPhail sat at a table in an open garage bay and talked with people as they walked by with boxes, bags and armloads of his books.

He had put out a call last week for people to stop by and select from his shelves some of the nearly 17,000 books he’d assembled over the decades. Otherwise, he said, the books would end up in the landfill.

Over the four days, last Thursday through Sunday, around 450 people stopped by MacPhail’s camp in South Strafford and walked up and down the narrow rows of shelves in a room he built above his woodworking shop.

“It was just a joyous experience,” MacPhail said in a phone interview from his home in Rochester, Mass., on Tuesday. “Just sharing that with all those people.”

He took notes and photographs and shared in writing some of what people told him. Much of it consisted of gratitude.

“You’ve made a lot of people happy,” one said. “I’ve got Christmases and birthdays taken care of for a long time.”

“Have you read them all?” dozens of people asked.

“It’s good to be up there with all those book people,” said another.

“We’re not greedy,” said someone who must have been taking a big store of books. “We’ll be passing a lot on.”

MacPhail directed visitors to categories and authors they were seeking. A librarian took several books by Rudyard Kipling for the Rudyard Kipling House, a museum in Dummerston, Vt., that was once the celebrated author’s home.

At 9 a.m. Thursday, only 12 to 15 people were milling among the shelves. But before long the numbers swelled. People chatted and shared shelf locations of particular authors.

“Many people stayed for hours,” MacPhail said. “Some all day. A few came every day.”

By Sunday morning, the collection had been whittled down to 4,800 books. Around 47 people came by and took around 1,200 books, MacPhail said.

The remaining 3,600 or so were packed into a U-Haul truck by Carl Ellis, a trustee of the tiny Roxbury, Vt., Free Library, and a helper. Darren Sherburne, the real estate agent representing MacPhail’s camp, also helped move the last of the books.

“He told me that this morning, the last of the books went,” MacPhail said Tuesday.

A message left for Ellis on Monday was not returned. Ryan Zajac, who’s been the librarian in Roxbury for 10 years, said “Carl is a bibliophile to the definition.”

The idea of throwing books out, however useless they might have become, is a cultural barrier, Zajac said. “It feels sacrilegious for almost everyone,” he said.

Roxbury Free Library holds a book sale on July 1.

The book giveaway gets at two conflicting values. Books are the foundation of cultural life, but their ubiquity and the culture’s hustle tend to leave them behind. Old editions, old ideas, language that has been superseded, all make books into windows into the past. Nostalgia is built in.

Many of the people who stopped in said they were committed to saving the books, MacPhail said.

“I do feel something significant may have occurred here,” MacPhail wrote in his observations. “People connected in the book aisles. They were gentle in maneuvering around each other and shared enthusiasms and titles, and I saw no instances of competitiveness. I think free or giving may have been the key. Or book people are simply good people.”

“Do books still matter?” he asked. “They did these few days in June 2023.”

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.